Credit Repair Tips

A bad credit score can cost you some serious cash.Over your lifetime, you can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to a bad credit score.That’s a pretty shocking number, and it should be. Bad credit means higher loan interest rates and higher insurance premiums and that all adds up over the years. Bad credit can hold you back from achieving major life goals like buying a house, going back to school, taking a dream vacation or even retiring on schedule. Fortunately, you aren’t necessarily saddled with bad credit for life — and there are a few options you have when it comes to credit repair. You could do-it-yourself or you could enlist the help of a reputable credit repair company.

There are lots of reasons why your credit may be in rough shape. Most are related to your spending habits. So, for instance, if you missed a few payments or your debt levels are too high (think over 30% of your total available credit limits), you’ll have to make some changes to improve your credit scores. And you may have to wait a bit to see an uptick. Most negative information can take up to seven years to age off of your credit report, though the effects on your score will lessen over time, so long as no new blemishes emerge.

However, if your credit is bad due to errors on your credit report, like a decades-old item that just won’t seem to go away or a single line item that’s appearing over and over, well, the solution to your credit woes is more cut and dry: You need to get that erroneous information off of your credit file. After all, It seems pretty unfair to pay more interest on a credit card, car loan and mortgage because the credit bureaus have wrong information about you.

Now, you can go through the dispute process with each of the credit bureaus on your own. This involves filing a formal dispute with the credit bureau(s) in question either online or via snail mail. That formal dispute should provide a detailed explanation of the error and you’ll want to include any supporting documentation you have along with it. (You can learn more about disputing errors on your credit report.)

Many people, however, either don’t have the time or don’t understand how to make their case. This is when many consumers start looking into hiring a credit repair company and law firm like Khan Law Offices.